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The original was posted on /r/cryptocurrency by /u/bkcrypt0 on 2023-08-11 16:43:54.
During the last bull run, meme coins gained stratospheric valuations for their trillions of digital tokens. Collectively, the top four meme coins/tokens still represent over $17B in market cap.
While the use cases are still a bit murky, and the die hard crypto tech enthusiasts don't see much value in them, meme coins and tokens have show an unexpected staying power in this bear market.
The main question is whether this can continue in the lead up to and through the next bull run. Are there enough people willing to speculate on a more use case-centric future for crypto memes or will they drift into the dustbin of digital fads?
As more institutional and retail investors enter the market, it seems unlikely memes will gather more credibility, but stranger things have happen before.
CoinGecko rankings
A little history (but not too much)
The first major success was DOGE, the self described "accidental crypto movement" that according to its founders was started as a joke. The coin is currently ranked #8 with a $10.6B mkt cap according to Coin Gecko. By comparison, AMC, a meme stock trader favorite that runs movie theaters across the U.S. has a current market cap of around $4B.
DOGE has a remarkably strong community and has grown from a purely speculative play into several use cases. There's the speculative wagering and possibly Elon Musk using DOGE for his ~~Twitter~~ X venture, but also a slew of wallets and payment tie-ups.
SHIBA INU -- Not to be outdone in the dog meme currency wars (cats have found little traction interestingly enough), SHIB (#15, $5.9B) also secured a top spot in the grand hierarchy of crypto market cap and still holds this position today, despite the overall massive sell-off of crypto in general.
Developers have moved forward with a L2 platform, swap DEX, metaverse, and governance token. According to their website, SHIB is accepted at hundreds of locations as a form of payment.
APECOIN -- Then along came APE coin (#64, $680M) which tied its fortunes to generative NFTs of apes with different clothes, hats, glasses, etc.
Yuga Labs, the founders, then tried to make the NFTs a special membership card to get into events. APE has fallen dramatically in value along with other alt coins, but it has progressed into a DAO with governance initiatives and token use cases including: exclusive games, merch, events, and services.
PEPE -- To keep the party going well past dawn, PEPE (#81, $522M), a frog meme token, clinched a top 100 spot with the goal of taking over where DOGE and SHIB carved their path to memedom fame.
Their roadmap includes a token-holder Discord channel and merch, but the founders, though there is no defined team behind it, say explicitly on the website that it is for "entertainment only".
Pepe website
Dropping into the #101 to #200 rankings there are a slew of other meme tokens including Bone Shibaswap/BONE (#101, $372M), APE NFT (#112, $324M), FLOKI (#149, $224M), and BABYDOGE (#175, $184M).
Some analysis . . .
Which all begs the question, is there a future for meme coins which aim to be a currency or the "entertainment" tokens that are just for fun?
If they were just a fad, you'd expect their valuations to suffer the most during a bear market, but they've weathered the storm better than some use case-oriented tokens in the VR and gaming world.
Of course there are many other wannabes and imitators that issued trillions of their own crypto, because, well, it's just so easy to mint crypto. They've dropped to near zero.
But the staying power of several meme cryptos, especially in the top 100, that by their very definition were initially meant as jokes, have come to represent actual communities.
They appear to have moved beyond the digital collectible versions of pet rocks, chia pets, and beanie babies that dominated analog fads of decades gone by.
Conclusion
The successful meme cryptos are likely to remain a speculative and somewhat fringe play as crypto matures and institutions along with more retail investors enter the market. If Musk uses DOGE as the primary payment option for his X venture, then maybe there's a broader uses case, though by no means guaranteed.
Beyond that, the memes, especially those with the weakest tokenomics, lack of key differentiators, and purely speculative nature, are unlikely to make major waves as the overall Web3.0 architecture and maturing defi platforms take shape.
The ones that maintain their following through the bear market, however, seem to have tapped into a collective zeitgeist that could well continue, and goes beyond a purely speculative bet, especially as they add governance to increase community involvement.
